Word: northerners
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Like residents of Berlin during the airlift, inhabitants of Erbil-the capital of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq-get a little flutter in their hearts when they see planes coming in to land. Built after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Erbil's international airport is a symbol to Kurds that their years of isolation as an oppressed ethnic minority are over, and that the Kurdish region, unlike the rest of Iraq, is open for business. Passengers flying into Baghdad have to endure a corkscrew landing to avoid possible surface-to-air-missiles. But a trip to Erbil...
...Iraqi Kurds have been in control of their own region since 1991, when, with the help of the American-enforced no-fly zone, they drove Saddam's forces out of northern Iraq. But now, four years after the liberation of the rest of the country, Kurdish Iraq is undergoing an identity crisis. On the one hand it is a rare American success story in the Middle East, a stable territory run by a secular leadership committed to economic and political reform and sitting on a huge pool of oil. On the other hand, it is a tiny landlocked region, uncomfortably...
...walls that ring Antrim Road police station. Plenty else has changed already. The petrol bombs and bullets that the walls used to hold back have stopped flying. Guards at the gate no longer keep their guns conspicuously unholstered. In fact, so much has changed in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) that when a young Roman Catholic like Rory Fitzpatrick--who just 15 years ago could have viewed the force as his natural enemy--explains why he joined in 2004, his answers are unremarkable: Good prospects, good work, good pay. "Everyone seems to have us pigeonholed as sectarian...
...Iraqi forces in stemming sectarian violence. Since the security crackdown began seven weeks ago in Baghdad, executions in the capital have gone down from some 40 a day to less than 10, according to Iraqi police. But truck bombs in a Shi'ite section of the northern city of Tal Afar earlier in the week sparked a gruesome round of reprisals that saw local police officers executing some 70 Sunnis men in the town. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said in a statement Friday that the recent spike in bombings is part...
...been gathered in front of television sets across Iraq every Friday night for four months cheering on one of their own. Hassoon won the competition with 7 million votes coming in via telephone and text messages from across the Middle East. The cheering crossed sectarian lines. In the northern - and Kurdish - city of Irbil and neighborhoods packed with Iraqi exiles in Amman, families took to the streets, cheering and waving flags...